Monthly Archives: November 2013

Google forcing Google+ onto YouTubers has had an unexpected result for me.

I do use (and now rely on doing things through) the cloud. Whether e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet work or general video or photo storage, it’s all done remotely and for some time now I’ve been happy enough using Google. However the way they’ve handled this forcing of YouTube commenters to use Google+ has irritated me in the extreme. The result of this was to go and look around at alternative cloud sources including Microsoft’s SkyDrive. Up till now I had rather ignored it but was pleasantly surprised to see how they had integrated Office functionality into it. This in turn got me thinking about mobile cloud access.

For years I’ve had two phones on me. One working through an on-going contract, the other (an elderly iPhone 3GS) working off a PAYG SIM (and on a different network). This means that if my contract network is out of service or the phone battery flat I still have internet / cloud access through the PAYG device. (It also provides me with an alternative mobile number for when I don’t want to give out my personal one.)

Having found this SkyDrive was unexpectedly good I thought I’d give a try with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 as a back-up mobile system (my current main phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, so therefore Android). So went out and got a Nokia Lumia 520 as a PAYG upgrade which was the cheapest Windows Phone 8 that I could find.

I was absolutely amazed by it. Despite being a low specification / bottom of the range model the screen was nice and clear, apps and programs opened quickly and ran smoothly, there was no hesitation in scrolling, and from an initial charge it gave me three days use (and even then was still at 25% battery level). I really had not expected such a positive experience both from the phone itself and from the operating system. Where the icons and tiles on a desk-top Windows 8 machine annoy me (and I always switch across to the standard old style desktop) here they suit the environment really well.

The Windows Phone App store is nothing like as well populated as its Android or Apple counterpart, however almost everything I want is there. As for anything that I’m not happy with I can always access it from its web page anyway, so that’s not a great problem. The one irritation with the phone is that the screen does seem like a magnet for finger prints and smudges. I must see if I can get a screen protector for it which may improve this, but it’s not really a big issue, after all this is as smart phones go about the cheapest one on the market. I can quite see why I’ve seen reports that in parts of the world it is the best-selling smartphone!

So from being almost a Google fan-boy – Chrome, Gmail, Google documents / Drive, relying on Google Calendar,Android user – from their poorly executed action of forcing Google+ upon its YouTube users (me) I’ve ‘discovered’ a whole new alternative cloud structure which I’m slowly moving across to.

A while ago I rendered out a video at 1080p and then again at 720p.

As expected the 720p file size was considerably smaller than the 1080p one. However I thought I’d play a bit more with this as I was a little ‘uncertain’ with the results I was getting, after all not just image size (1080 / 720) had changed, but bit rate too. On play back both videos looked ‘good quality’ and even stretching the 720 up to fill a 1080 size window didn’t noticeably reduce its viewing quality.

So I took a short 20 second clip standing on a street corner which started with the camera held still (so a mix of non-moving buildings but with cars and people going past) and then at the 10 second point panned the camera around so everything was now moving relative to the camera.
Then it was a case of rendering this out at 1080p various times, the only thing being changed between each session being the bit rate, working up from around 800 Kbps to 32Mbps.

Down at the low bit rates stationary items looked all right, but moving items (people, cars, the buildings when the camera was panning around) were of very poor quality. At the high bit rate end of the scale everything looked crisp and nice, however both rendering time and file size had also grown.

What was also apparent was that the choice of playback program was significant. Different players, VLC, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, all will play back the same clip differently. Same applies to using different browsers as a play-back engine – they are not all equal. Also what you have recorded makes a difference. A clip with little movement and few colours will be very different from a clip with lots of movement and activity.

Then a matter of working up from the bottom to find the bit rate cut-off point between where a clip was unacceptable and one was watchable; and coming down from the high bit rates and at what stage starting to notice a degradation in quality. Then finding an overall mid-point balance between quality and file size .

So what this really means is that there is no one ideal bit rate setting that’s going to cover all situations. For my set-up, with my camera and my editing software and thinking of uploading to somewhere like Vimeo or YouTube, then I’ll be thinking of working at 8 Mbps for indoor videos where there’s not a lot going on, and 12Mbps for outdoor videos full of colour and movement.
But this just my experience. You will need to do your own experiments to find your best compromise settings that will suite your equipment and set-up.